“The Order of Forms offers a probing, ambitious, and innovative argument with far-reaching implications across fields. Kornbluh turns away from dominant particularist and historicist methods in literary and cultural studies and gives shape to a stimulating new set of strategies for thinking the political in the humanities and beyond. That she is capable of bringing together psychoanalysis, Marxism, literary formalism, and mathematics makes this a virtuoso work of theory.”

Caroline Levine, Cornell University

“The Order of Forms is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in several decades. Staging the convergence of discourses that, however historically contemporaneous, have never been rigorously linked together, Kornbluh generates a series of provocative and convincing arguments about literature, criticism, and the agency of form. Her approach makes her a theoretical singularity.”

Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago

"Kornbluh should revolutionize our understanding of literary realism and its relationship to representation."

Rachael Scarborough King | Los Angeles Review of Books

"As proficient in contemporary critical theory, historical materialism, and formalist geometry as in theories of the novel. . .The Order of Forms makes a case for the 'world-building' nature of novels, which do not just unfold in particulars but also play in abstractions, performing and forming as well as reflecting their world."

Victoria Baena | Los Angeles Review of Books

“Kornbluh anchors her brilliant and challenging book in the 19th-century realist novel but goes well beyond those confines to argue forcefully for the political dynamism and durability of forms and formalisms in our time. . . . In its formidable push toward abstraction, its utopian striving for collectivity, and its insistence on building new futures rather than dwelling in the past, The Order of Forms often feels like a study of 19th-century culture in high-modernist mode.”

 

Public Books

“In [Kornbluh’s] dazzling book, formalist mathematics crystallises what forms can do, introducing new ways of organising thought and relationships. . . . Thinking about the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the 19th century alongside 21st-century psychoanalysis and Marxism, Kornbluh boldly gives shape to a new set of strategies for thinking politically in the humanities.”

Times Higher Education

"Anna Kornbluh’s second monograph on Victorian-era literature,The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, joins a coterie of recent studies invested in the intersection of mathematics and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. . .With The Order of Forms as an aid, instructors will feel more at liberty to introduce students to this interdisciplinary practice of reading literature formally using math as a framework. . .Kornbluh’s book demonstrates how grappling with mathematical concepts can open up new relations between people, spaces, as well as the text."

Aaron Ottinger | Romantic Circles